Drugs and Sex and Rock-n-Roll, baby!
Sounds pretty libertarian to me.
Darn right! Hunters are huge on the environment.
We’ve been mainly focusing on “liberals” in this thread, but SA also thinks it’s a big conspiracy that the media has “elites” in it.
You’ve been saying all along that liberals are top-notch? How gracious of you.
“Elitism” in the negative sense is the notion that persons born into the upper class have an automatic right to be in a position of authority. Conservatives have been hijacking the natural resentment that people feel toward that attitude and using it against people like scientists, journalists, and educators.
The purpose of hewing to high intellectual standards is not to humiliate everyone else, but that’s spin, init?
You can of course provide cites that I’ve ever claimed any such conspiracy? It isn’t necessary for the media to “conspire” to draw elites; elites are drawn to it (and to show business and Democrat politics) like moths to a flame.
No, elitism, in the sense that conservatives refer to it, is a smug and haughty sense of moral and intellectual superiority, which, while baseless, so thoroughly permeats liberal ideology that it’s become a defining characteristic.
This is complete and total bullshit. There is a difference between thinking a biologist is better than a janitor and thinking that a biologist is better-qualified than a janitor to be a senior administrator in the EPA. (‘biologist’, ‘janitor’, and ‘senior administrator in the EPA’ chosen more or less at random. Well, the last one was designed to make sense with the first one; obviously, assuming an equal amount of education in the area, both would be equally (badly) equipped to work for the State Department.)
Well, liberal elitism has Bill Clinton appointing James Witt, a person who had hands-on experience in emergency management, to head up FEMA, where he reduced political patronage, demanded professionalism, and actually began a process by which cities drew up realisitc plans to cope with emergencies and then tested those plans. Conservative populism has George W. Bush appointing Joe M. Allbaugh, a political organizer, to run FEMA, where he did little to continue Witt’s policies and kept waffling about FEMA’s budget, accepting Bush cuts until various storms, (notably in Texas), demonstrated that FEMA would be hampered by those cuts. Following Allbaugh’s return to campaign organizing, Bush then demonstrates even better populism by handing FEMA over to a political fundraiser, Michael Brown, who re-instituted the political patronage that Witt had abolished and dismatled most of the policies Witt had put in place, thus preparing the agency for the exemplary performance it displayed following hurrricanes Katrina and Rita.
We also see the same sort of good populism and evil elitism in the cases of the conservative Kansas State Board of Education and the School Board of Dover, PA, where the conservatives kept trying to insert feel-good pseudoscience into the classrooms while those nasty elitist liberals wanted to keep the classes mired in the texts from hoity-toity scientists.
Those bad old elititst liberals.
You know what? Conservatives like to claim things like Universal Health Care won’t work, despite the fact it does work as most of the first world shows.
In other words you have a group who generally believes and argues for something that’s proven wrong. You know what you call people like that? Fools and liars. Ether they’re too stupid to know what’s going on or they’re deceitful. Which is it?
If it makes me elitist to feel superior to fools and liars then by God I’m an elitist.
Oooh! Call on me.
Is it BOTH
?
A couple questions for you, Starving Artist:
- Do you consider conservatives morally and/or intellectually superior to liberals?
- If yes, on what do you base this?
How do you reconcile this with the fact that the conservatives’ base is the super-rich, and Christian evangelicals who want to impose their obviously superior values and views on everyone, disregarding the valid beliefs of others, the Constitution, and science? I’d say those folks were pretty haughty and smug, with a definite sense of moral superiority.
You guys missed the operative words, here. The moral superiority of conservatives is a fact, a true fact that you could look up. The smug sense of moral superiority of us kumbayahoos is baseless, hence, delusional.
Its a fairly simple, straightforward set of conclusions, so long as you accept the underlying turtles, all the way down…
And of course we all know that when I speak of that well-known liberal smugness and elitism, I’m talking about a the relative merits of biologists over janitors in the administration of the EPA; I’m talking about Bill Clinton and James Witt. :rolleyes:
No, I’m talking about mundane, run-of-the-mill, everyday liberals of the sort you might run into at political rallies, making movies in Hollywood, professorizing in the nation’s universities and colleges, writing magazine columns, or…or…or this place! [One night in Bangkok and the world’s your oyster…ahem, pardon].
Yes, the exact type of smug, haughty (and largely baseless) moral and intellectual liberal superiority I’m speaking of can be found (and in fact can’t even be ignored 
) right here on the good ol’ SDMB. Hundreds of posts a day demonstrate this very thing.
That is the kind of elitism I’m speaking of, and it’s abundant.
:: Walks off, hums to self, “Tea, girls, warm and so sweet, Some’re set up in the Somerset Maughm suite…” ::
Because, of course, you’re neither smug nor do you have a sense of superiority yourself.
Just in case anyone thought I was insane, I meant that Mallard Fillmore best sums up the silliness of arguments like the OP.
I mean Mallard Fillmore is satire, right? Like this guy?
(I do know it’s not, but a boy can hope.)
And what about the conservatives you run into a political rallies? Do they not also possess a sense of their own moral superiority? What about professors? There are no conservatives in the higher education business? None in the media, writing magazine columns? Do you see the point I’m trying to make?
Yes, it is abundant, and it’s EVERYWHERE. There’s plenty of smug, haughty superiority on both sides to go around. Elitism is no more a liberal quality than politeness is a conservative one. You saying it’s so doesn’t make it so.
No. What you are really, really talking about is the sense of moral superiority to which every faction lays claim while trying to demonize their opponents–except that you attempt to pretend that your own expression of superiority is simply “true” while the same expressions by your opposition are “elitism.”
Some of the haughtiest, most smug pronouncements heard in this country in the last thirty years have issued from the mouths of Gingrich, Falwell, Dobson, Hyde, Santorum, Lott, Lugar, and dozens of others. (Reagan was also prone to that sort of opinion.) Now, I would not claim that liberals were free of this particular taint, but I would not go out of my way to pretend that only one side or another was so afflicted.
It is amusing, of course, to see someone who claims that every evil that occurs in this country is the result of the actions of one group also claims that that group is guilty of a feeling of superiority.
Does Starving Artist really have the capacity to disappoint you? You really need to lower your expectations.
I consider conservatives to be morally superior in many ways, but not all. And I certainly don’t see anywhere near the same type of snide, condescending, nose-in-the-air attitudes towards their opponents coming from the right as I do from the left. From the right I see mostly anger, contempt and disgust.
Intellectually, I consider us to be roughly equal. The reason for this is that I don’t think political orientation really has very much to do with intellect at all. Dolts and geniuses and everything in between can be found on both side, and in equal measure I would guess.
In other words, conservative vs. liberal is largely a matter of life experience and emotion.
(IMHO, of course. ;))
I’d have to know how you define “super-rich”, and how much of the Republican base they represent percentagewise, before I could give you an answer. My guess is that the super-rich, as a percentage of the overall conservative population, is very small…around 2 - 4% would be my estimation. And I don’t think that Republicans have a lock on being super rich. Many of that number would be Democrats or unaligned.
So in other words, unless you have reliable information to the contrary, I’d imagine that super-rich Republicans actually represent a miniscule percentage of the overall Republican base…or votership as I’d prefer to call it.
I wouldn’t know because they don’t go around with their noses in the air like liberals do. And besides, they get virtually no widespread exposure in terms of anything other than newsclips and soundbites. Their views aren’t favorably presented in the media, in movies or in newspapers and entertainment magazines, yet these are precisely the venues from which liberal superiority emanates and has for decades now. Like I said, when you’re talking about national exposure and what people experience as they go through their lives day-to-day, liberals exude smug superiority, and conservatives, in their limited way through Fox and Limbaugh and to whatever degree they can get mainstream media exposure, exude mainly anger, contempt and disgust.
But having said that (and not to be agreeing with them in priniciple; I’ve been pretty clear around here that I generally favor gay rights), the way you and other gay rights proponents phrase this question is more than a little misleading. Now, I don’t expect what I’m about to say will get much traction with you, but I think it’s a valid point, and the thing is, most of these people don’t view themselves as wanting to “take anything away from anybody” or “impose their values” so much as they want to maintain the ways and values they’ve grown up with and always known. So from their point of view, they way things always have been and should remain is under attack. They want to keep you from imposing your values on them (or on the society they live in). So it’s not so cut-and-dried, and they are every bit as unhappy with what they view as aggression from you (not you specifically) as you are with what you regard as agression from them.
The fact of the matter is that when it comes to issues like this, liberals love to use inflammatory language to try portray their opponents in the worst possible light, and, while I’m in favor of gay rights for the most part, I also believe that things are the way they are in regard to peoples’ motives and that it’s dishonest - and ultimately at least somewhat self-defeating - to assign certain motives to people that they don’t actually posess in order to advance a particular political agenda. The groups being inaccurately portrayed know better and the neutral fence-sitters know better, and they get put off by these deliberate misstatements of intent…especially the more conservative ones who tend to be more prescriptivist when it comes to language…and they become even more angry and determined to fight you (again, not you specifically) than they likely would have been had the subject been broached more openly and honestly. I mean, I’m in favor of gay rights myself, and this kind of talk puts me off even.
So, given that in at least 99% of the world, homosexuality has been repressed and punished and condemned for centuries, it is understandable, if a person wants to approach the subject realistically, that the people who seek to marginalize homosexuality view that marginalization as the way things have always been and the way they should continue to be.
The way to change their minds - and this is anathema to the left, who seems to prefer anger, name-calling and impatience born of righteous indignation as its way of achieving social change - is through experience and education and letting people find out through exposure that gays are not a threat, that they truly are born that way, and that, in the main, they’re just like everyone else. All you accomplish by accusing gay rights opponents of wanting to “take away their rights” is to make them even more angry and determined to fight you.
Now, having said all that, how many, as a percentage of the overall conservative population of this country, have this rigid, hateful type of Christian determination to fight gay rights? My guess is that it’s a relatively small percentage that has been blown way out of proportion by the media and gay rights activists. I also suspect that a significantly larger share of voters than you might think, when it comes to Prop. 8 types and similar issues, are actually liberals and people who are pretty much politically ignorant or otherwise unaligned.
So I’m a long way from believing that the “Christian right” makes up the lion’s share of anti-gay voters, and from believing that the strident, hate-filled type of anti-gay Christian voters that you describe make up a very large percentage of the overall conservative votership.
Wow, this is exactly what YOU are doing, only you’re doing it to liberals. If you go through and replace the word “liberals” with “conservatives” it would read pretty much the same way, with as much validity. This is a tactic, one used by both sides of the partisanship. You say, “Liberals are rude, elitist snobs who dress poorly and their goal is to destroy American cultures and traditions.” Well, just because you choose to characterize them this way doesn’t mean you’ve railing against anything that is real or true about liberals. It’s a straw man, and you continue to batter him around calling him the wrong name.